RAG reranking shootout: Cohere lifts an answer from rank 15 to 1 while a small cross-encoder makes it worse
Affectionate_Slip654 · reddit · 2026-10-20
The author compared four RAG rerankers (Cross-Encoder, LLM-based, Cohere, Jina) over 5 payment-industry PDFs (1,507 chunks), tracking before/after rankings. Key findings: similarity ≠ relevance; a small local cross-encoder pushed correct chunks out of Top 5; the LLM reranker ranked both answer chunks 1st and 2nd; Cohere lifted an answer from rank 15 to 1, and Cohere/Jina gave the best balance. Code and video walkthrough are public.
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